On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 12:58, John Chronakis wrote:
> And here are my questions:
> * How does debian amd64 compares with other distros (suse, fedora) in
> terms of stability and 64 bit efficiency?
Usually gentoo guys would disclaim that gentoo is way faster than debian
because of all their fine-tuned compile options specifically tailored to
the system they're building on. Well, this might be true for i386, but
it surely isn't for amd64 - simply because all the debian pure64
packages are built using the amd64 optimizations: there is no
speed-vs-backwards-compatibility tradeoff here. As for stability, debian
pure64 is mainly based on debian sid/unstable. It runs fine for me, but
I probably wouldn't want to run it on production critical systems. But
actually I doubt that's different with the other distributions - amd64
just isn't tested as well as i386 is for obvious reasons ;)
> * What is the difference between pure64 and gcc-3.4? I saw somewhere
> that gcc-3.4 binaries run faster. Is there a catch?
I haven't tried the gcc-3.4 archive myself, but rumor has it that it is
faster - gcc-3.4 making more aggressive optimizations using the new
registers the amd64 introduced. The catch being that the official debian
ports are running with gcc-3.3. So the gcc-3.4 branch is an amd64
specific one. It is planned to continue that branch, but there's no
estimation as to when all those branches will finally converge...
> * The mailing list left me with the impression that sarge is not ready
> yet, is it?. Does it keep up with the i386 sarge? Can it be installed
> like an i386 sarge (net inst->base system->package installation)?
Well, official sarge is going to be released "soon". amd64 sarge is
actually a symlink to sid, afaik (correct me if I'm wrong). As for
installation, there are debian installer CD images available for amd64.
Generic, i.e. i386, netinstall images wouldn't work.
--
Sebastian Steinlechner

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